I am sitting in Corsica right now, and the island has achieved something quite remarkable.
Corsica has one of the highest BEV shares in the French rolling car parc.
According to Roole Data, electric cars account for 5.3% of the car parc in Corsica, compared with 3.1% for France overall. Germany, for comparison, is at around 4.1% BEV share in its passenger-car stock.
That may still sound small if one only looks at new-car registration headlines.
But in the real car parc, this is a big difference.
The rolling stock moves slowly. Cars stay on the road for many years. That is why BEV adoption in the total vehicle fleet normally takes time, even when new-car sales rise quickly.
And this is exactly why Corsica is so interesting.
This does not feel like a market driven mainly by regulation, ideology or government pressure. It feels much more practical than that.
People adopt BEVs when the system around the vehicle starts to make sense.
A BEV does not win because the brochure is good. It wins when people can use it without anxiety, when charging is visible enough, when the operating model works, when the car proves itself in daily life, and when the second buyer starts to trust the product as well.
Corsica seems to show that adoption and infrastructure can reinforce each other.
More BEVs on the road create more charging utilisation. Better charging makes BEVs easier to choose. Rental fleets expose thousands of drivers to electric cars. Used BEVs become available locally earlier than they otherwise would. And local buyers start seeing electric cars not as a theory, but as normal vehicles.
That is the amazing feat.
Because this is how BEV adoption will really progress.
Not only through targets.
Not only through regulation.
Not only through product launches.
But through a working ecosystem where vehicles, charging, fleet utilisation and the used-car market start to support each other.
This also matters for charging as a business.
Charging infrastructure becomes much more attractive when it is connected to real utilisation. And utilisation becomes easier to generate when fleets, rental companies, local users and visitors are part of the same system.
That is the part I find so interesting here.
Corsica is not just a story about more electric cars.
It may be a story about how BEV adoption and charging economics can grow together.
I will write more about what seems to have made this possible, because there is a concrete business model behind it.
And I think many regions, cities and fleet operators in Europe could learn from it.